[Oleg]

Originally Posted by Traf Rellik

Perhaps it's the way I put it that wrankled everyone. An analogy may help:

Take 80 PED worth of skill in one category (say it's the only skill for profession "a"). The cost to gain it would essentially be the same whether it's a single skill or a dozen, like mentioned above. However, take that same 80 PED and distribute it to those dozen skills and although you have the same level in the profession, you will find it harder to chip that 80 ped in or out, and more costly and much less net value, etc. This effectively "pieces out" the contents into segments that are harder to market. THIS is the watering down effect I am talking about. The gains are not reduced but the effort in inserting or extracting them sure is. Since the OP was discussing chipping "useless" skills out, my post was more about the piece-meal efforts required BECAUSE of the additional categories that we have to deal with. Instead of one "good" skill, we got a bunch of "junk" skills, with penny-ante contents.

Good vs. Bad skills is another matter entirely -- while *all* skills are earned based on the relative contribution, not all of them have the same demand (and subsequent markup). So if 80% of your gains are in a low markup skill, your rise in levels is less meaningful than if 80% of your gains are in a high markup skill that contributes to the same profession. Example: Animal taming has a number of skills, and you can reach a fairly high level and not have *marketable* skills when done. It's deeper than just a "1 ped skills would equal 1 ped no matter which skills they are earned in" response.

Re-reading my post, I can see where I went wrong with the poor explanation, my bad. However, an extrapolation of the two conditions (bringing it down to 1 skill/profession and comparing it to a case with 100 skills/profession -- the "watering down" effect is *real*).

In my opinion the disadvantage here is much outweighed by the advantage of having such disparate skill gains, which is that you can 'side-skill' other professions while concentrating on a main profession.

You can't call it "watering down" anyway. 1 skill/profession would be a completely different system and is incomparable to the system we actually have.

So I still disagree